What age is that?

Yeah, I think what attracted my parents to the Odyssey2 was the keyboard — I think they thought that it meant that it was (or at least might be in the future) capable of being a computer as well as a games console. Which never happened of course.

At the time there was a distinction between "computer games" and "video games", though. While later the terms would get blurred, at the time of the crash in 1983, if you wanted to play an adventure, or an RPG you had to play computer games. Video games were just shallow things where you moved a spaceship around and…

Exactly. I'm 46 and I've owned exactly two consoles in my life — an Odyssey 2 (1980) and a PS3. I've played computer games for 35 years though.

That actually sounds a lot like the American RPG "Don't Go Alone", also released in 1989

Oh, 8-bit computers were pretty popular in the US, at least in the early 1980s, with the Apple II and the C64 being the more popular ones. What wasn't popular here so much was the 16-bit generation of Amigas and STs. When people upgraded their 8-bits they tended to go to PC-clones or maybe a Mac.

Two years later (1990), though. I do remember it — We had recently gotten a PC-clone at the time and was big into checking out shareware.

Its scientists are working to produce a new breed of laborer by combining human DNA with that of local fungi.

Of course, this is implicitly assuming that there is a meaningful distinction of the two types of reanimated corpses. Neurobiology kind of shows the "you" inside your head that used to be explained by means of a soul in pre-scientific eras is really just a function of your brain. Which might explain why 1) a shot in…

Exactly. Trump is simply the end result of what Reagan started — the main difference is that he doesn't use "code words" to hide it. When Regan railed against "Welfare Queens" who were supposedly living large at the taxpayers' expense, it is pretty clear he wasn't imagining them to be WASPs.

That's Lovecraft's version of horror, though. Even Cthulhu isn't "evil" in the human sense but just rationally wants to awaken and go about his business, and if humanity has to perish for this to happen, then so be it.

Plus he has to shoot the Moon with cancer. Or something like that.

Even though I prefer Blade Runner without the narration, at least there it makes sense because film noir detective movies often had it.

And the roadside attraction in Arizona is called "The Thing?"

Oh, I like Bradbury too, just that he's more of a fantasy writer.

But it isn't really. There the joke was "why is this nerdy guy in the FBI simulator" and the answer was "because he programmed it". The point of David S. Pumpkins is that the characters think he is a reference to something they don't know and that freaks them out. Hence the elevator operator quoting HPL to the effect…

Hope you don't like figs. No wasps, no figs.

Which is kind of why Bradbury wasn't really a "science" fiction writer even he gets called that because of the Martian Chronicles. Personally I think Charlie Brown Halloween and Scooby Doo are great because they get kids to question the validity of claims of the supernatural.

Is it our common heritage though? The thing about movie hosts (and children's TV show hosts) was that they were generally local in the pre-cable era — people outside a given metropolitan area would have no idea who they were but had their own equivalents.

Presumably all writers use pens (or maybe pencils). Typers on the other hand use keyboards.